FTAA - COMMITTEE
OF GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES ON THE PARTICIPATION OF
CIVIL SOCIETY

CONTRIBUTION IN RESPONSE TO THE OPEN AND ONGOING INVITATION

Name (s)

Chris Brand

Organization (s)

Citizen of Canada

Country

Canada

Firstly, I’d like to say how much I
appreciate the opportunity to comment on the draft agreement. So many of
these treaties seem to be negotiated with no input from the citizenry they
affect.

Regarding the overall process, I
understand that there is the possibility of reducing the timeframe for the
agreement. I think this is a very bad idea. It is far better to stick to
the original plan. To do otherwise risks creating a less well-thought-out
agreement and risks alienating the citizens it affects by giving the
appearance of wanted to avoid giving due consideration to all the various
arguments.

I was surprised to see the vast amount
of material in the draft agreement devoted to Intellectual Property. This
seems particularly odd given the Competition part of the draft agreement.
One of the most important prerequisites for competition is that there are
no monopolies, yet Intellectual Property law deliberately creates
monopolies for a limited time in order to encourage creativity and the
spread of ideas. Intellectual Property law is thus diametrically opposed
to free competition and I personally would prefer it if the agreement
focused on the competition side.

Furthermore, Intellectual Property law
has to tread a very careful line in order to avoid encroaching on freedom
of expression. Clearly, the works that are protected by copyright are
expressive and restrictions on their reproduction are therefore
restrictions on expression, albeit fairly limited restrictions. I believe
that freedom of expression, being a fundamental human right, is infinitely
more important than the stimulus to creativity that is intellectual
property law. It is therefore imperative that each and every expansion of
the rights covered by intellectual property law be clearly and
unambiguously beneficial to society as a whole. Restricting people’s
freedom to communicate with one another should only be done for the most
compelling of reasons.

Intellectual Property law in the
Americas seems to be in a state of flux at the moment. In the USA, the
Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millenium
Copyright Act are both currently being challenged as being
unconstitutional. The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion
Act is currently being debated. Canada is currently in the middle of a
consultation process about what changes, if any, need to be made to
copyright legislation. The WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty and the
WIPO Copyright Treaty have only recently come into force and have yet to
be ratified by many of the countries involved in the FTAA process. It
appears that there is much disagreement about the form that copyright law
needs to take in order to be effective in a highly connected, highly
digital world. The FTAA should surely be reflecting the agreed best
practices rather than trying to answer these questions that the individual
nation states have been working on for so long and none appears to yet
have answered.

I am particularly worried that powerful
industry groups in the USA seem to manage to use international treaties
such as the WIPO treaties and the FTAA in order to further their own
objectives of increasing the duration and scope of the copyrights they
hold so as to further increase their profits. It is far from clear to me
that the Americas as a whole benefit from these changes. In fact, the only
beneficiaries from changes such as the DMCA in the USA are these powerful
industry groups that are already making huge profits.

In summary, please keep to the original
timetable. Ideally, I’d like to see the entire Intellectual Property
section removed from the treaty. Failing that, it makes sense to codify
only proven legislation. Do not use this treaty to make sweeping changes
to Intellectual Property law.